Reserved cards are cards that will never be printed again in a functionally identical form.

A card is considered functionally identical to another card if it has the same card type, subtypes, abilities, mana cost, power, and toughness.

The exclusion of any particular card from the reserved list doesn't indicate that there are any plans to reprint that card.

The reprint policy applies to both English and non-English cards.

All policies apply only to tournament-legal Magic cards in printed form. Wizards of the Coast has and may continue to print special versions of cards not meant for regular game play, such as oversized cards. The restriction also does not apply on non-redeemable digital cards in Magic Online or MTG Arena.[8]

The Reserved List was created in the wake of the protests of Magic card collectors when a lot of their cards had been devalued with the release of Fourth Edition and Chronicles.

It had always been the policy of WotC to print any functionally novel card with a black border before or at the same time as it was printed with a white border. It had also been their policy never to reprint with a black border any previously published Magic card which had identical art and card power. The purpose of these policies was to make the black-bordered, limited edition versions of Magic cards as collectible as possible. However, it was now recognized that much of the collectibility of a Magic card also was determined by its availability for game-play purposes. Accordingly, WotC decided to expand their previous policies by creating a new category of cards, called "Reserved Cards," that they would never print again in black or white border in game-functionally identical form.

Wizards of the Coast reserved the right to continue to print non-standard versions of cards for sale or promotional use, such as factory sets and oversized cards.

WotC reserved the right to reprint cards from Fallen Empires, Ice Age, Homelands, and subsequent limited expansion sets, as well as cards from Chronicles. In order to maintain the collectibility of these products, however, they would reprint in white border no more than 25 percent of the rarest cards. At least 75 percent of the rarest cards from each of these sets would never be reprinted in either black or white border. For this purpose, the rarest cards from a given expansion set were defined as those appearing with the lowest frequency on the rarest print sheet used to print that expansion (i.e., cards from Fallen Empires, Chronicles and Homelands designated U1 and cards from Ice Age designated R1 in The Duelist magazine's cardlists for these sets).

In conjunction with the release of each new core set, such as Fifth Edition, WotC would announce which sets were considered eligible to have cards from them rotated into the core set. Any rare card from those sets not rotated into the core set at that time would become a Reserved Card and thus would never be printed again in black or white border in game-functionally identical form.

In 2002's revision WoTC decided no cards from the Mercadian Masques set and later sets would be reserved. Commons and uncommons from Limited Edition were removed from the reserved list due to overwhelming public support for this change. In consideration of past commitments, however, no other cards would be removed from the list. The exception was Feroz's Ban from Homelands, which was reprinted in Fifth Edition but (mistakenly) still on the Reserved List at the time. It was also removed.

The original policy only applied to non-premium cards, meaning that Reserved cards could still be reprinted as a premium-exclusive card. When this was applied to Duel Decks: Phyrexia vs. The Coalition ‎and From the Vault: Relics‎ the Magic community's reactions were to a large extent negative.[9][10] Starting in 2011, no cards on the reserved list would be printed in either premium or non-premium form.[7]

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